I was packing up a long lock of hair to mail off to Locks of Love and started thinking about all the pieces of human bodies that we save for sentimental purposes. Picasso is rumored to have saved all his hair and nail clippings and even cataloged them with dates. He was afraid of witchcraft. I have all my children’s baby teeth. A little baby food jar of bloodied gems. I saved them because I pulled them and when I handle them I can still feel the cringe that grasped me each time I plucked a sharp little tooth from their mouths.
My mother was a nurse in the forties. She and her whole graduating class divied up the skeleton they studied by. She got a toe. She keeps it in her jewelry case. A stranger’s toe for which she harbors a strange reverence. On the other side of my family there is a story that a bar of soap came here from a concentration camp. It so bothered the wife of the soldier that she buried it in a home made ceremony in her back yard. It is most likely a myth that the soap was of human origin but the tale is there just the same. It’s the tale that makes it real, so I want to hear your body part stories. Don’t just tell me that your mother has all your baby teeth or your first lock of hair. I want to know the who, what, where, when and why of all those skeletons in your closets. Along the way, I’ll tell my stories.
It struck me that there are millions of us who keep parts of family members, pets, even strangers for unspoken reasons. Is it reverence? Love? Religion? What is your reason? Is it akin to keeping a religious relic? Nothing is too strange or too normal to discuss.
I know someone who buried her pet in a foam ice chest so that she could exhume the remains when she moved. There are people who have their dear pets taxidermied. Some of us keep things that doctor’s remove from our bodies, gall stones, kidney stones, parasitic twins.
Don’t just tell me that you have a golf ball sized kidney stone that was made into a ring. Tell the story. Have you visited places that hold human body parts as relics? Lets stick the spade in the ground and see what turns up.
Leave your comment or email me at Lavonne.westbrooks@gmail.com and I’ll post your story.
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My father passed over about a year and a half ago.
He donated his body to a medical university.
They promise to send me ashes on the
second anniversary of his passing.
Sometimes i wonder what we have done to mother earth
Comment by silent lotus August 12, 2008 @ 4:20 amby burying so many with cancer.
Interesting notes, Lavonne!
Comment by Vasile Baghiu August 16, 2008 @ 5:45 pmVasile
I felt a kindred spirit when I read of you keeping your children’s baby teeth. I thought I was one of the few people who did that. At least yours are in one container. Mine are in countless tiny envelopes, the teeth wrapped in tissue, and the date of the tooth’s departure and which child it belonged to.
I would sneak in during the night, and relieve the space under their pillow of those little teeth that lay in wait for tooth fairy treasure and then find that I could not bear to toss it in the trash. Four kids later, the stash is pretty significant. My daughter was repelled when she learned that I kept them.
Something that still bothers me – - – When my daughter was six or seven, she had her more than waist length hair cut. I still cringe at the memory of it being swept up and thrown away at the salon. I wish that I had the hairdresser braid it and cut it off for me to keep. Why? I still am not sure, other than this was my daughter’s beautiful hair that I had so lovingly cared for throughout her life and it was being discarded like spoiled leftovers into the trash.
I came across a discolored tiny fingernail in my oldest son’s baby book recently. He hit it with a hammer when he was a young boy, and for some reason, I felt the need to save it when it fell off. Of course, this is the same child whose earliest years seem to be detailed in full, cross-referenced, categorized and recorded in far too many ways, the result of a mother with too much energy and time on her hands.
Comment by Pamme Boutselis September 19, 2008 @ 2:07 pmWhat a lovely story! I think it is something very natural but strange that mothers revisit the pain of their children.
Comment by lavonnew September 19, 2008 @ 3:16 pmDear Lavonne.Some years ago I was rushed into hospital with a slipped disc, they operated and removed a large chunk of my disc and the surgeon
Comment by Peter Wicks September 28, 2008 @ 10:55 amgave it to me in a bottle of tissue preserving liquid.Somewhere in my house lukes a lump of me I can’t find, but I will carry on looking ,lol
Somehow that seems poetic to me Pete! How much of ourselves do we lose over the years? No matter how we bottle or package it for preservation, it slips away.
Comment by lavonnew September 28, 2008 @ 3:37 pmMy gall bladder surgeon handed me the ’stones’ or whatever they’re called in a bottle of solution — chloroform I imagine, if that’s the stuff they put body parts in to preserve them. There were only two, and so ugly they gave me the shivers. Somehow or other they made it home with me; I had all those stiches and staples and someone else packed my stuff out of the room. But first time I set eyes on that small bottle — into the bin they went. Vanity! Now, if they’d been pretty and petite little gallstones, well . . . I might’ve just kept them now, mightn’t I have?
Interesting thread here, Lavonne.
Comment by lynn doiron November 12, 2008 @ 3:55 pmAs a child I loved all animals and was lucky enough to ride horses. The ponies and horses, “ugly” or well proportioned, like most animals, were all majestic and beautiful in their own way. They were quiet, complex, magic messangers of mother nature, beings wiser and older than I, keepers of some sort of secret that could be felt but not known.
After the first time my mother shortened my pony’s mane, she took one of the clumps off the cold, dirty washrack floor, washed it off, tied a ribbon around it and gave it to me too keep. I did and continued the tradition long after it seemed I would grow out of it.
Inevitably, I stumble upon these clumps of hair now and again, tied in ribbons that are now faded and crumpled. But they are the only tangible part of the beings that brought so much magic into my life.
Comment by sonalee June 19, 2009 @ 1:42 amThat’s a lovely story Sunny! What a smart mom to know to do that!
Comment by lavonnew June 19, 2009 @ 1:53 am